engleski

Nanoparticle-based detection of the marine toxin okadaic acid

Shellfish are an important part of the consumer fish market and constitute a large share of the aquaculture industry. As filter feeders, shellfish may bio-accumulate a wide variety of pollutants or algal toxins which may subsequently find their way into the human food chain. It is the latter, such as okadaic acid, domoic acid, saxitoxin and brevetoxin, which may present the most immediate acute negative effects on human health, including diarrhetic, amnesic, paralytic or neurotoxic shellfish poisoning. While the mouse bioassay has been the standard test method to date, the movement towards reducing and replacing animal tests has necessitated the development of new and more sensitive techniques for the detection and quantification of these biotoxins. In this direction we report on the use of functionalized doped lanthanide nanoparticles and labelled antibodies for the detection of okadaic acid by luminescence resonance energy transfer. We have found that the ratio of the acceptor and donor emissions is linearly proportional to the number of binding events between okadaic acid and anti-okadaic acid antibody. We expect that this proof of concept will constitute the first step in developing a new analytical method that will ultimately allow the multi-parametric detection of a range of biotoxins simultaneously.

biosensor ; LRET ; nanoparticle ; okadaic acid ; toxin

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